Signaling Identity
chapter abstracts with representative bibliographic references
as of May 10, 2007
Judith Donath
judith@media.mit.edu
Part I: Foundations
The introduction provides an outline of the book and its purpose. The signaling
chapter is the foundation of the entire book; it explains signaling theory and the key
issues involved in applying it to human behavior. The three final chapters in this
section - on deception, reputation and impression formation - are short introductions
to large concepts that are key to understanding signaling theory and its application.
1. Introduction
Human beings are social creatures. We live in groups, form intense relationships
with each other, and structure our world with organizations ranging in size from
partnerships to nation-states. Today, an increasing amount of this social interaction
is occurring in the domain of mediated communication.
The mediated world is a synthetic space, wholly man-made. Its design determines
what we can see, hear and do within it. It is a mutable space, rapidly evolving as
technology advances and new interfaces are created. It is an increasingly ubiquitous
world, touching every aspect of life. Email and other communication media allow
people to maintain a much larger set of contacts and acquaintances; online forums
make it possible for geographically and culturally distant people who share a
common interest or concern to find each other. People rely on the net for support
and friendship; it is the place to go for finding dates, business connections, and life
partners.
The goal of this book is to help us understand the social dynamics of this ever
changing world, and to help shape the design of future spaces. To do this I use the
framework of signaling theory as developed primarily in the field of theoretical
biology. Most of the things we want to know about each other – one’s identity,
status, and intentions – are qualities that are not directly observable. Instead, we rely
on signals, which are indicators of these hidden qualities, in order to comprehend the
world around us.
We may interpret a big house as a signal of wealth, direct eye contact as a signal of
honesty, a pierced nose and tongue as a signal that someone is not seeking a career in
banking. However, signals are not always reliable. Sometimes the sender
deliberately manipulates them to create a false impression. Signaling theory
provides a framework for understanding why some signals are open to deceptive use
while others are not. Furthermore, in the human world, signals exist within a rich
context of cognitive abilities and cultural meanings. We need to look to this larger
context in order to understand how signals develop and how they are understood (or
not) by those who see them.
Signaling plays an even bigger role in mediated communication, for the online world
is a place built of information, in which nearly everything is a signal. Qualities we
are accustomed to simply observing become, in the mediated world, hidden traits we
assess through observed signals. Height, for example, is directly observable in the
face-to-face world. In mediated spaces, we can infer height only from signals, such
as the claim “I am over 6 feet tall.”
Mediated communication occurs within wholly designed environments. Whether
you can see the face or hear the voice of your conversational partner, whether you
can see a history of other people’s actions, and whether or not some external
evidence anchors their claims of identity are all a function of decisions made by the
system’s designers. These design decisions determine the reliability and
effectiveness of communicative signals and other cues.
Yet today such designs are often made with an incomplete and often naïve
understanding of what people are really trying to convey and interpret. By looking at
communication through the framework of signaling, and by understanding how
signals work – what makes them reliable and how they evolve – we can design better
contexts and interfaces for social interaction.
The introductory chapter outlines the basic ideas of the book. It discusses the
fundamental qualities of the mediated world – that it is synthetic and designed, that it
connects millions of people, and that it is a disembodied world, composed of
information rather than objects, bits rather than atoms. It will explain why the
question of how we perceive and perform identity online is interesting and important
and it will describe how examining these question though the lens of signaling theory
can bring greater clarity to our understanding.
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2. Honest and Dishonest Signaling
This chapter explains signaling theory, which is the theoretical foundation of this
book.
Many of the things we want to know about other people are not directly perceivable.
Are you a nice person? If we had children together, would you be a good parent?
Did you really like the cake I baked? We rely instead on signals, which are
perceivable indicators of these interesting but invisible qualities. A quality can be
almost anything: strength, honesty, genetic robustness, poisonousness, suitability for
bookkeeping employment, etc. We rely on signals when direct evaluation of the
quality is too difficult or dangerous. A bird wants to know if the butterfly it is about
to eat is poisonous before it takes a bite, and relies on the signal of wing markings to
decide whether to eat or move on. An employer wants to determine before making a
hiring decision whether a candidate will be successful or not, and relies on signals
such as a resume, references, and the candidate’s actions and appearance to predict
suitability for the job.
Signaling occurs in competitive environments. The interests of sender and receiver
seldom align exactly and often are quite at odds with each other. Sometimes the
competition is fierce and overt, as with prey and predators. Potential prey may
signal to predators that they are poisonous or that they can run so fast or fight back
so strongly that pursuing them is futile. Sometimes the competition is subtle, as
when the signaling is between seemingly congenial companions. However, even
within cooperative relationships there are conflicts of interest about plans and
identity. I wish to present myself in the best possible light while you want to know
what I am really thinking and what I really can and will do.
In these competitive arenas, being deceptive can be quite beneficial for the signaler.
If a bug presents itself as poisonous when it is not, it may avoid being eaten. If I
present myself as more experienced than I really am, I may get a better job.
However, such deceptions are harmful for the receiver. If the rate of deception
becomes too high, the signal loses its meaning.
Signaling theory explains what makes some signals more reliable than others are. A
reliable signal is one that is beneficial to produce honestly, but too costly when
produced dishonestly. One class of signals that satisfies this requirement is known
as “handicap” signals; these are signals that impose extra costs in the domain of the
resource being signaled. In the animal world, the prototypical example is the
immense antlers that signal the strength in an elk. Carrying such antlers is very
costly in terms of strength: a weaker elk cannot afford to expend so much of its
strength on this display, and thus must display smaller antlers.
The costs that ensure reliability can also be imposed from the outside. Much of
human signaling is “conventional” signaling, where the relationship between signal
and meaning exists by convention, rather than a tightly coupled structural
relationship. Such signals are open to deception, for there is no inherently greater
cost paid by dishonest signalers. However, the receiver or the community at large
can impose costs on dishonest signalers to maintain reliability. Such social
retribution requires knowing the identity of the receiver and a communication
structure for coordinating the response.
Signaling theory has been developed primarily in biology, looking at animal
communication. Applying it to human social interactions requires several
modifications. First, people are adept at finding ways to circumvent the costs of
deceptive signaling, and understanding the dynamics of this arms race is essential.
Second, we are capable of complex social organization and can impose societal costs
on deceptive signalers in ways that are impossible for non-humans; this enables our
extensive use of dynamic, conventional signals. Third, most analyses of animal
signaling have taken for granted that the meaning of the signal was understood by
the receiver. In the world of human signaling, particularly with rapidly changing
conventional signals, the meaning of the signal is often ambiguous. We need
understand how signals acquire their meaning and to account for misinterpretation in
analyzing the signaling process.
This chapter presents signaling theory, drawing from work done in economics,
biology and game theory. It discusses the differences between unintentional cues
and communicative signal, outlines the different types of costs and benefits that
make up the economics of signaling and shows how to apply this theory to
understand phenomena in daily social interactions.
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517-546.
Guilford, Tim and Marian Stamp Dawkins. (1993). Receiver Psychology and the Evolution of
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3. Deception
This is a shorter background chapter about deception.
Keeping signals reliable requires being able to detect and punish deceptions. We
need to understand the underlying cognitive process that goes into creating and
sustaining a lie, for internal conflicts about the lie may cause one inadvertently to
reveal cues indicating one’s deception. This has important design implications for
creating mediated environments, for cues to deception may be obvious in one design
and obscured in another.
Deception is present throughout our everyday life. Society condemns some
deceptions: doing something wrong and lying to avoid punishment is not acceptable,
and neither is maliciously concocting false tales in order to discredit another. Yet
other deceptions are condoned or even required. If I do not like the cookies you have
kindly baked for me, it is still required that I thank you graciously and with seeming
sincerity for the well-intentioned treat. It is important to understand when reliability
is actually the goal: sometimes, we prefer deception. Furthermore, in the social
domain deception is often ambiguous. Where there are rigid class distinctions,
attempting to pass as a member of another class is clearly proscribed as deceptive.
However, in a society such as ours, where social mobility is celebrated, it is unclear
whether cultivating a more desirable accent and dressing in the style of a social class
above the one in which you were born is an example of deception or ambition.
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4. Individual identity and reputation
Identity and reputation play an important role in maintaining the reliability of
signals.
Punishing deceptive signalers can make reliable signals that are otherwise
insufficiently costly to prevent deception. A police officer’s badge is a conventional
signal of authority. The punishment that goes with impersonating a police officer,
rather than the cost of the badge, keeps that signal honest.
Identity is required for such sanctioning: one must be able to connect the misdeed
with a specific individual. More powerful than individual retribution is social
enforcement, which requires the ability to communicate information about another
individual – reputation information - within the community. Reputation allows
many people to benefit from the experience of a few.
The foundations of social sanctioning, and thus of conventional signaling, are
recognition (knowing the identity of another), memory (being able to retain that
knowledge over time), and communication (being able to convey that information to
another). In the animal world, species that do not have these abilities cannot have
reputation based social enforcement. Humans do have them and social sanctioning is
deeply integrated in our everyday communication – it is part of what has allowed us
to develop our rich and dynamic vocabulary of conventional signals.
However, in the online world, we cannot take these abilities for granted. Identity is
problematic: participants may be anonymous or use easily replaced pseudonymous
identifiers. Recognition and memory are impaired in the perceptually sparse world
of online interaction. In the physical world, our experiences provide rich
impressions: we see the others’ faces and clothing, hear their voices, and encounter
each other in richly detailed contexts. Online, such sensory details are often missing:
people may be identified only as cryptic login names or simple and often misleading
pictures. Communication is may also be limited. For example, in some sites, public
postings are the only means of communication.
In the face-to-face world, members of a group often share reputation information
privately among themselves. This type of information sharing, often termed
“gossip”, is an important mechanism for maintaining social groups. It spreads
information about an individual’s actions, thus helping to maintain community mores
and signal reliability. It also motivates people to maintain strong social ties, so that
they will be in the loop for this valuable information, so that they will be in the loop
for this information.
Gossip traditionally works on a small scale, among communities of acquaintances.
The large groups of strangers that are common in the online interactions require a
different process for sharing reputation information. Reputation systems, in which
people describe their experiences with the subject in a public posting, are a common
solution. Anyone in the community, which is often the public, can read these
comments. These public rating sites do not require that the rater have any
relationship with the listeners, and thus they function on a much larger scale than
gossip does among acquaintances. However, this raises issues of reliability: is a
person with no ties to the listeners motivated to provide them with useful
information?
This chapter will look at individual identity and reputation. The first part will
discuss individual identity – which is itself a quality we interpret from signals of
varying reliability, such as names, identity cards, biometric markers or one’s face.
The second part will be about reputation, looking at both at private gossip and at
public reputation systems as means for disseminating it. The chapter will conclude
with an analysis of alternative approaches to large-scale reputation management.
This chapter is important for the thesis of this book because many of the signals in
the mediated world are conventional signals, which depend on reputation to maintain
honesty. Contemporary public reputation systems are often unreliable;
understanding how to make them more trustworthy is an important design challenge.
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5. Impression formation
Individual identity is about who specifically you are: it is the identity of ID cards,
fingerprints, and face recognition. Social identity is about what type of person you
are: it is the identity of impressions and prototypes, of the expectations we have of
how others think and will act and of the rules that govern how we act toward each
other. Social identity is fundamental to all social interaction: people want to know
about others’ beliefs, status, affiliations, and intentions in order to interpret their
words and actions and to predict their future behavior.
The signaling examples from the world of biology have been simple mappings, with
a direct correspondence between signal and trait: big horns indicate strength. Our
interpretation of social identity is more complex. We bring to the process a number
of pre-existing prototypes and we form our impressions of each other by identifying
them with one or another of these prototypes. Thus, from a limited set of
interactions and observations we form richly detailed (if not always accurate)
impressions of each other. Understanding how these we create these prototypes,
share them across a culture, and use them to form beliefs about each other is an
essential part of understanding how human social interaction.
Interpretations of identity are subjective. The prototypes that populate one person’s
cognitive map of the social world will be different from another’s, formed by
different experiences. The more people share of a common culture, the more likely
it is that their social prototypes will be similar.
One of the paradoxes of the online world is that it brings together people from vastly
different backgrounds into an environment where identity cues are sparse. The
relative lack of identity cues necessitates relying more on one’s personal prototypes
to infer details about others, while the cultural difference among participants means
that these prototypes, and thus the resulting impressions, are likely to be disparate.
Online identity cues are easily manipulated. A self-presentation is seldom a direct
and “honest” indication of a person’s actual internal state. People manipulate the
signals they give off in order to manage the impression others have of them, to
induce various emotional responses, and because it is required by society. Looking
at impression management through the lens of signaling theory makes us focus on
the constraints that keep these signals meaningful.
Sometimes, we want to assess others’ internal state as well as possible, to “see
through” the ways they have chosen to manage the signals they give off. But not
always. Sometimes we are content with the behavior as it is, disregarding whether it
is a reliable indicator of internal state. The dynamics of identity presentation and
interpretation are complex, and the receivers may be complicit with the signalers in
maintaining deception.
Online identity cues are also often novel, displaying different types of information
than is available in the face-to-face world, or showing it in a very new form. The
online world provides an extraordinary opportunity to see how people adopt and
adapt to new forms of signaling. For example, social network sites display of all
one’s ‘friends” as part of one’s profile, a feature that provides a new modality for
personal expression, manipulation – and for perceptive decoding.
This chapter will introduce these key concepts about identity. It will discuss
prototype formation and the special problems presented by the culturally diverse yet
communicatively sparse online environment. It will explore what “honest” signaling
means in the context of identity management.
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Part II: Analysis and applications
The second part of the book looks at areas where signaling theory can change how
we think about human communication and how we design for online interaction.
6. Fashion as a signal
The thesis of this chapter is that fashion, often thought of as foolish and frivolous, is
actually a signal of one’s adeptness and adaptability in an information society. It
indicates one’s level of access to new information and willingness to change
continuously. With information becoming the key source of power and influence in
our society, fashion is becoming an increasingly significant signal.
Fashions are signals where the form of the signal changes over time while the
indicated quality, generally one’s affiliation to and status within a particular social
group, remains the same. There are fashions in clothing, music, language and ideas
– indeed, any changeable, information-based expression. Just as displays of strength
indicate one’s prowess in the physical world, and displays of money indicate one’s
prowess in the financial world, displays of fashion indicate one’s prowess in the
information world.
Fashion signals occur in socially mobile cultures, where status is highly contested
and knowledge and social connections are essential. As a widespread cultural
phenomenon, fashion first emerged in Europe in the 14th to 17th centuries, as the rise
of merchant and artisan classes brought new social mobility, and technological and
scientific developments ushered in a world in which change and a belief in progress
replaced the stasis of the medieval world. In the following centuries, information
flow has accelerated, and so has the rate of change in fashion. Whereas 16th century
fashions might change over a period of months or years, today there are fashions that
emerge and sink within the course of a few days.
Fashion signals access to information within a particular social affiliation, one’s
willingness to adapt to new ways of doing things, and one’s commitment to that
affiliation. Keeping up with changing fashions requires knowing which fashion to
follow (thus signaling information access) and spending time, money or other
resources on frequent updates (thus signaling need and commitment).
Within the culture of fashion, there are innovators, leaders and followers: roles that
require different levels of knowledge and resource expenditure. At the top of a
fashion hierarchy one must spend considerable time maintaining the contacts that
provide access to the newest ideas. As a particular signal moves down the hierarchy
and become mainstream, less effort is required to learn about it. The path a fashion
takes as is spreads traces the structure of a society.
In the 16th century, fashion signaled access to information, at the time a rare
resource. Today, information is plentiful, but attention is limited and the ability to
find the right information in a barrage of data is a valuable trait. Material fashion –
fashions embedded in goods such as cars or clothing – cannot keep up with the rate
of change that contemporary information flow make possible. What will be the
future of fashion? How will fast, information-based fashion be integrated with
personal display – and how will fashion become embodied in the virtual world? The
chapter will conclude with an analysis of the design challenges posed by accelerating
fashion.
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7. Gifts
Gifts are puzzling. They are puzzling to economists, who have noted that they are
extremely inefficient. Enormous amounts of money are spent buying presents for
people who often do not want or need the item purchased for them. And they are
puzzling to participants in the exchange: an entire industry of etiquette writers and
department store gift advisors exists to help people figure out what is an appropriate
present to buy. Holiday shopping is stressful, as people worry about who to give to,
what to give, how much to spend.
The seeming inefficiency of gifts becomes much more understandable when we look
at them as signals that indicate the sender’s intentions for the relationship and beliefs
about the recipient’s interests. In this case, the inefficiency of the gift is an important
part of its signaling function: it is a potentially costly risk. Indeed, there is a subtle
but important distinction between gifts and other forms of exchange; when the focus
is on the value of the gift or on the expectation of return favors, the gift becomes
barter – or bribe. Gift giving is an example of how an increase in efficiency can
cause a decrease in communication: if you make explicitly known your preference in
gifts, then my giving you the right gift can no longer indicate how insightful I am
about your beliefs and taste.
Gift giving has been proposed as a metaphor for the growing phenomenon of
voluntary participation in collective endeavors. Such endeavors include software
projects, from operating systems to mobile games, large publications, and extensive
support networks. Like gifts, these voluntary efforts are puzzling to classical
economists: why would someone find little joy working 8 hours a day to write
compiler code for pay, then go home and happily code some more for free?
Understanding the motivations driving these contributions is an important challenge,
for an increasing number of significant projects are created as free collaborations.
This chapter will look at gift giving as a form of social signaling, discussing the
distinction between gifts and other forms of exchange, and showing how some
seemingly inefficient costs serve an important communicative function. The second
part of the chapter will examine the role of gifts and gift-like behaviors in the
formation of collaborative endeavors.
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Press.
8. Social networks
Social networks are the interlocking ties of relationships that form the structure of a
society. The advent of the mediated world has changed these networks in several
significant ways. First, it has made them bigger. Historically, a village resident
might have had 100 contacts over the course of a lifetime; today’s active online
participant may be in communication with several hundred people and have an
accumulation of thousands of contacts. Second, it has made them global. In the past,
social networks had consisted primarily of local ties; today they are worldwide
networks in which similarity of interests, rather than geography, defines proximity.
Most recently, it has begun changing how they a formed. A number of software
programs and web sites build large-scale renderings of social networks by inviting
people to list all their friends and connections. These people in turn list all their
friends and connections, creating a partial, yet extensive social network map. The
goal of such sites is not only to depict the network, but also to assist people in
making new connections through their existing ties.
This chapter will start with a description of the structure and formation dynamics of
social networks. The focus will be on signaling information about social networks –
how people indicate to others who their connections are and why they would do this.
The chapter will then look at how communication technology is changing social
networks and discuss the changes this makes in what information people want to
know about each other and the signals they use to indicate it.
Current social networking sites are still primitive. Their notion of ties is uniform –
they make little distinction between the ties connecting close friends and vague
acquaintances. Nor is there any recognition of the faceted nature of social life.
People associate with different groups, consonant with different facets of their lives:
they may not wish to make those connections known to each other. The final
section of the chapter will discuss new designs for social networking.
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9. Real and virtual faces
The face is essential in real world social interactions: we read character and
expression in the face, we recognize people by their face, and the face indicates
where one’s attention lies. Yet the face is absent from many online interactions – and
this is in part why many people find cyberspace to be only a pale substitute for real
world contact.
There are numerous approaches for incorporating facial representations into online
interactions. These range from the simple and now ubiquitous smiley to animated
avatars to real-time video, all differing significantly from the experience of face-toface, immediate interaction. Sometimes this difference makes a visual interface less
useful or appealing than a textual one; in other circumstances, it can be preferable
even to face-to-face discourse. Most notably, we can design the mediated face to
selectively present information: it can convey expressions but not identity, or vice
versa. Controlling the information a face conveys is a very complex challenge, for
we read meaning in the subtlest of expressions.
Signaling theory is central to this chapter because the face’s structure, decorations,
and expressions all function as signals that we interpret as representing underlying
qualities of character, affiliation, and emotional state. How reliable these signals are,
whether they are innate or culturally dependent, and what is the real nature of the
underlying qualities are all controversial topics. I will present arguments from
research in cognitive science and related disciplines.
This chapter is central to the book’s thesis. It starts with an in-depth discussion of
the face as signal, and then uses that as the basis for analyzing online facial
representations and for designing future implementations. It is the main example of
how to apply the insight gained from signaling based analysis to new media design.
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10. Epilogue: The Not Quite Human Other
This chapter is about our relationship with the not-quite-human other: software
agents, robots, highly augmented humans. It is the most philosophical chapter of the
book, having at its core questions about our knowledge of other minds, the nature of
empathy, and the extent to which we really want to know each other.
Throughout history, people have attempted to synthesize life. Ranging from the
animatronics of Vaucanson to the dark myths of the Golem and Frankenstein,
attempts to play the role of ultimate creator have elicited fascination and horror.
With the advent of computers, this quest and the concerns surrounding it have
achieved a new urgency, for these mechanical brains, while looking nothing like a
living creature, arguably have the potential to produce thought and language, that
which is most uniquely human.
In 1950, Alan Turing published the essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
in which he reframed the question “can machines think?” as “can we know if a
machine is thinking?” He used the metaphor of the Imitation Game, now popularly
known as the Turing Test, to show that it was conceivable that a machine would be
undetectable able to imitate human interaction without necessarily thinking like a
human.
In the early 1960’s, Joseph Weizenbaum created Eliza, a computer program modeled
on a Rogerian psychoanalyst that used simple linguistic parsing to sustain its side of
a conversation. His goal was to show that even an obviously non-intelligent
machine could converse, and thus conversation was a poor arena for judging
intelligence; instead, people reacted enthusiastically to the computational partner,
even proposing it as a replacement for human psychologists. Weizenbaum, deeply
disturbed by this reaction, retired from the field of computer science and wrote about
the dangers of becoming reliant on the machine made decisions, decisions that would
be made without human compassion or wisdom.
Today, conversational agents are becoming common participants in mediated
interactions. The issues raised by Turing – can we distinguish between machine and
human in a mediated interaction – are essentially signaling questions. What are the
signals that indicate that one is human? Conscious? Intelligent? How do we define
these underlying qualities – and are they the ones we are trying to assess? In some
contexts, we want to know if the other is truly empathic – and in others, all we really
want to know is if they have access to an accurate train schedule.
This chapter will examine the problem of our perception of machines that seem
human through the lens of signaling theory. It will start with a close analysis of
Turing’s paper and Weizenbaum’s Eliza project. The signaling approach will
highlight the importance of context – that depending on the qualities one really
wishes to uncover, the relationship between signal and quality, including the costs of
the signal and its reliability, differ markedly. The analysis will extend from software
agents in the mediated world to robots and augmented humans in the immediate
world. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the implications of these ideas
in terms of our understanding of human relationships and the importance of identity
and empathy.
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